HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute, welcome to our webcast with our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is March 25, 2020.

And there’s no question that we are now in the middle of a hammering effect of two crises, which are changing life on the planet dramatically: The coronavirus pandemic and the global financial disintegration. And this is where we have to start, to take a look at where we are in terms of the spread of this pandemic, so Helga, why don’t you begin with that?

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: It is clearly very quickly spinning out of control, and I think it’s useful to look at the condition of several countries, to really quiet those idiots who still say that this is just a “flu,” and no worse than an influenza, and people who say this is all a conspiracy. This is a real pandemic, and it does require the absolute unified cooperation of all countries in one effort to overcome it — because, this is a pandemic. And a pandemic means it is raging across the globe.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India, shut down the whole country for 20 days, and that is 1.3 billion people. Now, if you have an idea of what the condition of life are in many parts of India, where you have real poverty, and not even infrastructure, no roads in some parts of the country, it will be, in all likelihood — despite the excellent healthcare system which India has — it probably will be much worse than in China.

It is spreading very rapidly to Latin America, to Peru, to Brazil, other countries; to Africa.

And if you look at the situation in Europe, the north of Italy is out of control. In Lombardy, the army had to come to transport the corpses from Bergamo and other places, because there were too many to be handled by the medical staff. Yesterday, the trade unions called for an eight-hour general strike, because they insist that the government should impose stricter measures, because of confusing messages people were still running around, trying to drive to Sicily by cars, and so forth; so this situation is one of really, absolute disaster.

If you look at Spain, where now the rate of infection is even greater than in Italy, you think you are in the 14th century, as you see from the paintings of Breugel and Bosch and Holbein, where, for example, in Madrid, there were so many dead that the army had to come to transport them temporarily to a big ice skating rink, because the hospital morgues were overwhelmed. Then, there are 400,000 people in nursing homes, where there is no protective gear, not enough personnel; the same situation is in Germany. I mean, Germany, the supposedly rich industrial power, because of a lack of precautions, and the budget cuts for 20 years, the health officials, like the chief of emergency of the Wolfsburg Clinic, Dr. Bernadett Erdmann, she said there is absolutely no protective gear for the medical personnel; others say they have only a few days, and if it strikes the medical personnel, that that is the end.

Then, in Great Britain, finally Boris Johnson, after pursuing for quite some time, this completely irresponsible policy of the “herd immunity,” which is the idea that 60% or 70% of the population must get infected first — which naturally means many people will die — he reversed course and imposed a lockdown, pretty much in the same way as Germany — only 2 people can meet, and only important missions can be done out of the home.

In the United States, the situation is getting to be the worst epicenter, according to the World Health Organization. New York and other places, but especially New York and Seattle, the West Coast, they’re red alert areas. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is doing a lot to do whatever is possible to increase the intensive care units in the hospitals, build more hospital beds, but it is an absolutely dramatic situation. Because if you think that you have all these homeless people, generally you have a complete lack of medical staff, you have a lack of medical equipment, and now the effects of the neo-liberal cutbacks of the last decades are really coming home to roost and we have a dramatic situation, which is why we absolutely need to reflect on the changes.

Obviously, we first have to do everything possible to stop it, and there, I can only say the experience from China, from Wuhan and Hubei province, is, you have to have testing, testing, testing, as much as possible; you have to gear up the production as much as you can, because what functioned in Wuhan was that they just tested everybody several times. They isolated the infected people, they put them in quarantine, and that did work. So, as a positive result, today, the quarantine in Wuhan can be lifted. But these kinds of measures which were applied in China are not being applied everywhere in the West and that lesson has to be learned very quickly.

SCHLANGER: Helga, you’ve mentioned in terms of the health emergency, the importance of cooperation and solidarity between nations. And we see an enormous effort coming out of China and also Russia, as well, to provide personal protective equipment and so on, and yet, we still hear the voices attacking China, blaming China — what’s wrong with these people?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: As you say, China is making an unbelievable effort: They’re now sending medical equipment to 82 countries around the world. They’re sending their medical teams, helping the African nations; they’re sending teams to Italy, to Spain, to France, to Iran, to Iraq, to Venezuela, and actually also to every country which asks for help, they’re responding to; even in Germany, where the district administrator from Heinsburg [North Rhine-Westphalia] was calling on President Xi Jinping for help. The general consul from Düsseldorf responded instantly on behalf of the Chinese ambassador in Berlin, and just asked how much equipment was needed and they would immediately cooperate. This district administrator was on a German TV program and the moderator asked, quite indignantly, why did you do that? And this administrator just said: Look, you have no idea. Heinsburg was the hotspot which was put under quarantine — it’s a small city but the entire population was under quarantine, because of a high infection rate; he said, you have no idea what it means to have days and days to treat so many people, and then have no equipment, so it was a complete act of desperation.

And I have said that any nursing situation, or any hospital, where you have a lack of equipment, people should ask China, because China has done certain things right, and the West has not. So, let me just say this: In an emergency like this, if you then have attacks on China and Russia, — and Cuba for that matter — I think these people are either insane, that they just don’t have the moral fitness to survive, or they’re criminal. And there are right now many think tanks and mainstream media that are still on this rampage. The think tank CSIS, the American Enterprise Institute, both had such statements, blaming even the Belt and Road Initiative and connectivity for [spreading the virus]. This is just completely insane, and shows a very evil intention. A certain moderator on the 2nd Channel on German TV yesterday, went into a raving attack, commenting on the fact that Wuhan is now ending the quarantine, and that they can also reactivate the economy; going into a really rabid, this moderator should be test for rabies, because something is wrong with the way he thinks.

If you look at what China did, and that cannot be stressed enough, China alleviated 850 million people from poverty in the last decades. Because of that, it became the second strongest economy in the world, and if China would not have done that, it would not have been in the position to react to the outbreak of the pandemic the way it did: Namely by immediately taking strict measures in Wuhan and Hubei province, by sending 42,000 medical staffers from around the country, and the whole country went into solidarity supporting this most-affected region. And that was successful, so now, they can lift the quarantine. And naturally, they have geared up their whole production to produce testing kits, masks, protective clothing, respiratory ventilators, and they have now decided to keep this up despite the fact that the crisis has somehow slowed down and signs of hope that it will be lessened inside China, so that they can supply the rest of the world.

To attack that, is, as I said, shows either an insane mind or a criminal intention.

I think what China is doing, and Russia for that matter, who have sent large amounts of support to Italy, and Cuba which has sent many medical teams around the world, these countries should be praised and this ideological indoctrination which some people cannot get rid, really has to be marked as a sign of senility or worse.

SCHLANGER: One of the other signs of insanity are people who are saying “No one could have predicted this, that’s why we’re not prepared.” But it’s clear, there’s a lack of personal protection equipment, a lack of ventilators, lack of hospital beds, and the idea that no one could have known about this, is completely false, as proven by what your late husband Lyndon LaRouche, has been warning about, going back to the 1971 break with the Bretton Woods system. And given the economic crisis that’s a part of this emergency, I think it’s really important for people to hear from you, precisely what Lyn had said and tried to do to get us to prepare for this.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. As you said, he warned that when Nixon took down the Bretton Woods system in ’71, he warned that this would lead to the danger of a new Depression, the danger of a new fascism, and pandemics. And then, in 1974, he instituted a Biological Holocaust Task Force, to study the effect of both the austerity policy following out of these Nixon measures, but also the result of the IMF and World Bank policies on the developing sector. Because, if people remember, the IMF introduced the “conditionality” policy, which meant that developing countries first had to pay their debt before they could invest in the health sector or infrastructure, and this Task Force warned that this would lead to new pandemics.

Now, we published in the meantime, six comprehensive studies, showing exactly what this economic Malthusian policy towards the developing sector would do, warning of pandemics, throughout the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s, and nobody can say that we did not put out the warning that this would happen.

Then, in 2002-2003, when the SARS epidemic broke out, there were many studies and scenarios saying, this can come back. And at that time, the latest, the governments should have gone into preparations for the outbreak of such pandemics, but the opposite was done: They increased the austerity, the cutback in the health sector. Many hospitals were taken down, the privatization health the sector to just go for profit, instead of the protection of the health of the population. In 2012, in the German parliament there was a study warning of exactly of such a pandemic of a coronavirus to come — and still, absolutely nothing was done. And we already talked last week about the scenario done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum in October last year exactly studying the outbreak of a coronavirus pandemic — and still, nothing was done.

And even when the pandemic broke out in China, end of last year, into January, and the Chinese government reacted with the known measures, all they could do was to attack the “authoritarian style” of China, but they did not do anything! The fact is, the German Health Minister Jens Spahn, in this period, said he did not expect the virus to come to Germany. He kept saying in January into February that the German health system was well prepared, and this is all either utter incompetence, or worse.

So I think that it should be really noted that my late husband, and the organization associated with him, we are on this since 50 years. And a lot of the attacks on us, came because of that, because we attacked Wall Street and the City of London and the casino economy as being responsible for this, and naturally, the powers that be really felt that to be their Achilles’ heel. So they started an unprecedented attack of slanders and vilification against us. They put my husband innocently in jail, Bush Sr., in particular. And I think the fact that our warnings were not listened to, really is now the reason why many people are paying with their lives. And if there’s any conclusion, then people must look at the analysis of my late husband, and also the solutions he had proposed, and which are still the only solutions to remedy the situation in the future.

SCHLANGER: Helga, I want to get to that in a moment when we take up the financial crisis, but I just want to bring it back to one other aspect of the solidarity of cooperation versus geopolitics: We have a call from the UN Secretary General for a world ceasefire. You’ve issued a call for an end to sanctions to countries like Iran and Venezuela, that are suffering from lack of equipment, lack of support. Just say something about that, because I think this is something that this geopolitics is actually war crimes.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. Sanctions are a war crime, because if you deprive entire countries from acquiring the medical supplies to protect their population, this is a war crime. And I think there must be an absolutely ruthless change in the thinking: I full heartedly endorse what UN Secretary General Guterres is calling for, a ceasefire worldwide, all the drone attacks and skirmishes, and whatnot has to stop. Because only if mankind is putting all our forces together to solve this, do we have a chance to overcome this crisis. And I think that the idea of President Xi Jinping, who already in 2017, at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, in Beijing, which I attended, where he called for a “Health Silk Road,” this is also something which absolutely must be put on the agenda, instead. Because we have to work together to build a decent health system in every single country around the world, what Xi Jinping calls the Health Silk Road, because if you don’t do that, you cannot protect a country. You cannot stop a virus from coming through the border.

The only protection is to go in the direction of building the economy in the Southern Hemisphere, our proposal to develop the Silk Road to a World Land-Bridge connecting all the continents through infrastructure and creating the economic conditions for countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, and parts of Europe and the United States, to survive. That is the only remedy. And people have to really straighten up and become reasonable.

And as the crisis will escalate, I think that will become clearer, and those who are still warmongers should be shut down and put in asylum, because they’re really a danger and a menace to the whole human race.

So I think this initiative of Guterres should really be discussed everywhere, and that should be the mindset to solve the problem.

SCHLANGER: The other area where your husband has been proven right, over and over and over, and you have absolute authority on, is the economy: We have to distinguish, I think, in the financial package between the emergency health aid that’s needed, and protection of people, versus the use of the so-called “big bazooka” to carry out multi-trillions of dollars of bailouts of hedge funds, shadow banking institutions and others. You issued a call for a shutdown in financial trading — why don’t you tell us what you had in mind with that?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: As you say, it is absolutely legitimate if the governments are now providing liquidity to keep the firms going, to keep people having access to wages, to payments to just maintain economic activity of the real economy. That is legitimate.

But that is not the whole reason why the Federal Reserve, and the ECB are going into the direction of helicopter money, and in the case of the Federal Reserve they already have announced $4 trillion in liquidity creation, and they said there is no limit to that. Lagarde, the President of the ECB has also said, whatever it takes. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the EU Commission, said every country can now “pump,” — and she used the word “pump” — pump as much money into their economy as they wish. The black zero is all of a sudden no longer the sacred cow it was.

And if that would be only for the real economy it would be fine. But a large part of that is to maintain the casino economy part of the whole problem. I think the former economist of the Landesbank Bremen, Folker Hellmeyer, he put out in his newsletter the correct point, that the over-dimension of that is to protect the dynamic of the algorithms in the financial markets, which is a sort of — one way of describing that, the derivatives trade is occurring in nanoseconds around the globe, and to protect that speculative bubble, this is why they are opening the sluicegates of the financial system. And that will lead in the very short term to hyperinflation as happened in Germany in 1923. And if people remember that lesson, that was the expropriation of the entire population of their life earnings and life’s savings, and that is now being threatened not in one country, but really in all the countries which are part of that system. And only those which are not entirely integrated into that have a chance to escape that, under present conditions.

So this is why I said that this is now the moment to close the markets, to stop these insane vacillations in the stock market, and use that pause of a short period of time, whatever it takes, and then implement a Glass-Steagall reorganization. And we have talked about this many times: The reintroduction of Glass-Steagall, the banking separation introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, would mean that the state is protecting the commercial banks, keep them running, and make a firewall so that the investment banks are separated and have no longer access to the savings in the commercial banks, or bailouts from taxpayer money, but that they have to bring their books into order on their own, and if they can’t, they have to declare insolvency and disappear.

Now, the reason why you need a certain pause, is because it’s complicated, because many of the things belonging to the real economy and are legitimate, like the pension funds, are now heavily involved in the casino economy because that has been the system as it developed. And you have to somehow protect those things which belong to the life’s earnings of people or their physical existence, and the real economy, and that takes some sorting out. So some things you have to freeze and it takes a while to figure it out. And then naturally, there is a lack of liquidity, and that’s why you have to have the immediate installation or reactivation of National Banks: These National Banks must give out credit lines directed to the real economy, and investment in productive projects. And that has to be done in every country.

Now in most countries you have the possibility, like in Germany you can reactivate or just strengthen the role of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau — the credit institute for reconstruction which was used in the postwar period to finance the economic miracle in Germany, which was based on Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corp. And similar approaches can be taken in every country.

Now, then, we need to have cooperation among all these national banks. You have to reintroduce a fixed-exchange-rate system, and then that becomes the New Bretton Woods system, a new credit system. And then, naturally, you have to introduce different criteria for what is a legitimate investment and what is not. And they are those things which mean an increase in the productivity of the economy, such as crash programs for thermonuclear fusion, for optical biophysics, for life sciences in general, to combat the origins, or to find out what are the origins of these pandemics, and how to overcome them; but also space medicine, space technology in general, international cooperation in space research and travel, these are the areas which absolutely need to be serviced by these credit lines, in order to develop new economic platforms: Because the devastation of this pandemic against the real economy is going to be very big. And you have to really think of, when you combat it, which hopefully will happen sometimes, with new vaccines and so forth, but you will have a devastation after that and you have to recreate the world economy on a higher level.

So these are the principles which my husband called the Four Laws [https://larouchepub.com/lar/2014/4124four_laws.html], and we are calling right now to implement all of this. And I ask all of you, our viewers and listeners to help in a mobilization, because it is very clear that the governments who were caught by surprise by this pandemic which they should not have been, because there was ample warning, they are also not yet in a position to discuss the principles, how to reorganize the economy: So, I’m really calling on you to sign our petition to have this shutting down of the markets, to go for the Four Laws, and to have a summit of the most important countries, especially China, Russia, India, and the United States, and hopefully with the cooperation with some other countries, to implement such a top-down, new world economic order, because nothing less will solve the problem.

SCHLANGER: Helga, I think people will appreciate what you just went through in terms of an actual solution, without panic, how to address what is an existential crisis. But you’ve also made the point, repeatedly, that this offers us an opportunity to think about the way we think about ourselves and our fellow human beings. You’ve talked about the “new paradigm.” I think, in the minutes we have remaining, it would be useful to give a sense of not just why that’s necessary, but also why it’s possible.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think the idea that geopolitics would be there forever is really a troglodyte idea, which only people like Ursula von der Leyen and such people seem to cling to. Geopolitics, the idea that one nation or a group of nations has the right to defend their interest against another group of nations, with all means, if necessary even military means — this is something, which in the age of thermonuclear weapons, pandemics, and just the fact that the whole world is hanging together so closely, is really an outdated idea. And it absolutely must be replaced by a new paradigm of cooperation, of defining the interest of the one humanity first.

What we have to adopt as a philosophy, is that there are common aims of mankind, such as the Strategic Defense of the Earth: This is a program of my late husband, which he put forward some years ago, where he said, our planet is not only threatened by asteroids, comets, and if one of these heavenly bodies would crash with Earth, it could be a complete catastrophe for our species, as a result. That’s something which no one nation can defend itself against, but we should cooperation. But in the same SDE approach, he also said, that we have to defend against the outbreak of pandemics. And obviously, that is an urgent lesson to be learned, because a pandemic also cannot be solved by one country, but you need to eliminate the conditions which make pandemics possible, which requires both a study of what is life; life is not yet well understood, because otherwise we could have solved sicknesses like cancer, or virus. A virus is not something which is not part of life — there are many viruses which are part of the biosphere, but we don’t understand exactly how they function and what is the process of life in general as part of the universe. It’s a principle of the universe, which we have to absolutely work together, all the scientists of the world should exchange their knowledge, they should cooperate on it.

So, I think the new paradigm, must be completely different relations among nations. Nations will probably be important, probably for a very long time to come, because they are the expression of a joint history, a joint culture, a joint language, poetry — you will not have an Esperanto and write poems — so nations will be important, but I think also they will become less important as compared to the idea of the one humanity, if we are supposed to survive as a human species. And that is an idea which also was articulated by my late husband, actually, late in his life, but he made it a big point: In the same way, he called for the abolition of the party system, in the tradition of George Washington, who said watch out for the party system because this is what causes the separation of people who then follow their lobby interests. And we should not have these parties. And in the same way, nations should cooperate and not be pitched against each other.

So I think the future of humanity must be defined from the standpoint of what kind of a future do we want to have in 50, in 100 years from now. Xi Jinping has called it “the community of a shared future” and this pandemic makes very clear, we have a shared future! We either survive all together, or maybe only a few of us, or none.

If we look at the present from the standpoint of where do we want the world to be in 100 years from now, we will have joint space exploration, we will have villages on the Moon, we may have a city on Mars already — we will have a completely different idea of collaboration and rationality, working together, referring to the creativity of the other, being happy when the other one is developing, instead of seeing it as a competition. And I’m quite confident that the human species is the only creative species, at least known in the universe so far, and that if we get through this crisis and really change our life, and change the view we have about this whole question, then we can actually come out strengthened out of this crisis and start a new era of cooperation of all of humanity.

But it does require a change in the thinking, and I’m inviting you to join us in this effort. And we need a lot of support: So, contact us, sign our petition for the Four Power summit, and work with us, because we need right now a mass mobilization, to do the kinds of things which the politicians, obviously, have not been able to do, or very poorly. So: Join us!

SCHLANGER: OK, Helga, thank you very much, and we’ll see you next week; and we’ll evaluate how things have moved in the course of the next days ahead. So, thank you.